The Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg arrested in Cambodia

After a global search, The Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was found in Phnom Penh and taken in handcuffs by Cambodian police on Thursday.

The founder had skipped his 12-month jail term and the responsibility of paying off his $1.1 million share of the $6.9 million fine in Sweden after being found guilty of copyright infringement in 2009 for operating The Pirate Bay. His two co-founders, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, and the site’s financier, Carl Lundstroem, were also sentenced by Swedish court, but an appeal in 2010 reduced their one-year jail sentences to between 4 to 10 months.

Warg was the only sentenced member to have failed to appear during the appeals hearing, with his lawyer citing an illness that prevented Warg from leaving his hospital bed in Cambodia. After not turning up for the beginning of his sentencing on January 2, he was placed on an international wanted list. He was eventually found by Cambodian authorities in the apartment he has lived in since fleeing Sweden to the Southeast Asian country.

“[Warg’s] arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology,” Cambodia’s police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told the AFP news agency.

The Cambodian government is reportedly working with Swedish authorities to determine the next course of action. “We don’t have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we’ll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case,” Chantharith said. However, Warg’s lawyers deduced that he would eventually be sent back to Sweden, pending some paperwork and legal documents that the Cambodian government is waiting upon.

The Pirate Bay was founded in 2003 as a file-sharing site and has long been a target of the MPAA and RIAA. Weeks earlier, the United States government sought recommendations for strategies that would influence an updated copyright enforcement policy. Among the organizations submitting strategies included a joint filing by the MPAA and RIAA in the hopes that their efforts will step up the fight against illegal file sharing sites.

Despite international efforts to rid of the site from threats, and arrests and bans in the United Kingdom, The Pirate Bay has amassed more than 31 million users and continues to operate today.